Henry James

Highlights from the Archives

David Lodge declared 2004 to have been “The Year of Henry James.” This was because 2004 saw the publication of two major “biographical” novels about James — “The Master,” by Colm Toibin, and Lodge’s own “Author, Author” — as well as a novel by Alan Hollinghurst, “The Line of Beauty,” in which the hero is writing a thesis on James.

Henry James once described himself, half jokingly, as ''that queer monster, the artist.'' It's a description that proves all too fitting in Lyndall Gordon's new book about James, a book that paints a chilling portrait of the novelist as a predatory genius who did ''nothing that did not feed his art'' and who willfully possessed ''the souls of certain people he had marked for 'use.' ''

Henry James's latest biographer, Sheldon M. Novick has attempted in his new book to penetrate the sensibility of James, and in doing so, create a novelistic -- one might say, Jamesian -- portrait of the artist as a young man.

Henry James (1843-1916) is the only American writer whom our well-ingrained democratic literary conventions have encouraged us to call Master. Not even Emerson, the philosopher of individualism who stands as a kind of Muse to all subsequent American culture and society, has been granted that title.